Legasista: This is a New RPG

Nippon Ichi
Software’s previously-teased games were missing from this year’s Tokyo Game
Show, to the surprise of many. This probably shouldn’t have been a surprise
since trade show unveils do no favors to small companies. Reveals at events of
that caliber are best left for titles destined to be heavily anticipated, which
would leave games shown by smaller companies overlooked. Not to say there were
many big reveals at TGS, hence the two-part
feature
I wrote on games that were absent.

 

NIS apparently
realized that, hence why they decided to reveal the three titles they were
teasing after the show. The
first game was The Witch and the Hundred
Calvarymen, an action/RPG for PS3 from the Prinny team revealed last month.
This week, NIS pulled the curtain back on Cladun-developer
System Prisma’s new title: Mystery
Tower: Legasista. Here we have yet another action/RPG for PS3, but this one
is of the dungeon crawler variety.

 

The
protagonist is a guy named Alto, who’s embarking on a journey to find a cure
for his stoned sister (as in: she’s been turned to stone). Alto must travel
though dungeons with a party of three other characters, who can use one of six
total jobs. The dungeons are littered with puzzles, traps, and beasts, but
that’s not all bad since the first
two can be used against the enemies you’re fighting against. Like your average
dungeon crawler, there are weapons and armor that can be acquired while
exploring, but there’s a catch: the equipment has HP, and if the character
carrying it takes damage, the equipment will as well. If it takes too much, it
will be destroyed. To lighten up the mood here, at least there’s only one type
of status effect: poison. But coming with that are multiple types of poison effects which can be
cured with different potion items.

 

You’ll be
able to create characters with the game’s character editor mode. Though you can
make characters using this game’s high resolution sprites, there will be an
option for low resolution versions too. The team would like to implement the
ability to import illustrations from your PC to make sprites out of too. Like Cladun,
there may be collaborations with other companies for character palettes and
equipment. Cladun x2, for instance,
included character palettes from Falcom’s Ys
and The Legend of Heroes titles,
along some from NIS’ own games.

 

Needless to
say, if I didn’t tell you this was by the Cladun team, you would have figured
it out by now if you played those games.

 

The
developers estimated that Legasista should take players 20 to 30 hours to
finish the main story, meaning that doesn’t include other activities and side quests.
Developer estimates aren’t always the most reliable, so don’t be surprised if
it takes you less than that to finish. But it should still be a meaty quest.
The game’s story sequences will be fully voiced.

 

The team
wanted to make this game for PS3 to display their style to a new audience. They
might be talking about territories outside of Japan here, where the PSP is
almost completely dead. Of course, coming with this is scrutiny from some fans
for being 2D, similar to the “criticisms” lobbied at Rayman Origins (which Legasista has some stylistic resemblance to,
especially with the armless high res sprites) when it was revealed to be a retail
game. It’s as silly as you’d expect at this point, and it’s a stigma we’ll
probably never get rid of.

 

Mystery
Tower: Legasista releases in Japan on March 15th. As usual, it hasn’t been announced
for any territories outside of Japan yet, but there’s a good chance that it
will get localized. We’re talking about a company (NIS America) that localized
both Cladun games on PSP, one of which released two months ago, after all;
though they only released them on PSN. The official website opens next
Wednesday, Japan time.

Information gathered courtesy of Andriasang and Siliconera.